Fighting for facetime | TDSU Ep. 6

01:15    what's up lifers and welcome to the Daily standup with lifetime value where we're giving you I'm not on my game today where we're giving you fresh Ideas Daily related to the customer success space I got my man JP here JP do you want to say hi what's up I got my maam Rob here Rob do you want to say hi what's up we're bringing that back Mary would you like to say hi what's up I [Music] feel was it Dorito oh my goodness and I am your host the pimento cheese sandwich of customer success my name is Dillon

01:48    young Mary thank you so much for being here do you want to introduce yourself sure thing my name is Mary maano I'm head of customer success at comp I'm wearing HR Tech um lifestyle reimbursements platform and I've been on the customer success customer service game for a long time so excited to chat with you guys today that's awesome thank you for being here and you already know what we're going to ask you but tell us what is on your mind when it comes to customer success yeah what is on my mind

02:14    one of you know I try to be a pretty good Problem Solver right and so I find it challenging to really get stumped sometimes right and one of the things I'm stumped on right now and trying to think of some good brainstorming with is customers that are just unres responsive or that ghost you completely right like I think we've all been there you try to take out all your magic tricks you're trying to give them some great info and insight but they just won't connect with you right so it becomes a big challenge

02:44    for sure so you're brainstorming that now you're noodling on it right now but do you have any ideas anything that's maybe worked in the past works most of the time isn't working right now and like where's your brain at yeah so we've tried a lot of different things like throughout my career I think there's different ways to get in touch with people so like in our our onboarding processes and when we're first introducing ourselves to customers when trying to find out their preferred

03:06    communication method people don't want to jump on backtack meetings and things like that they've got enough on their plate so I think that's a key point is finding out what appeals to them the most and like the best way to get in touch with them and then also trying to get creative I've hit the point sometimes where I'll try to reach out to a contact that's been ghosting us on LinkedIn instead of email and things like that and the approach of like hey just want to make sure we're not getting

03:29    in your spam folder like we've got some important updates and information and that does tend to nudge people by reaching out on LinkedIn because they kind of think wow if you're reaching out on a different platform you really must have some important Insight can I ask you a question Mary about that first of all thank you for bringing up an important topic that is consistent across every organization I've been a part of and I also appreciate that you bring it up in a way as to brainstorm not to say here's my opinion about the

03:55    world which a lot of people like to do I've Been Working On A playbook for this so I'm I'm also brainstorming these things that's kind of interesting my question for you is imagine you get a hold of the customer and you ask I noticed you haven't been responsive can you help me understand why do you think they'd say I'm not really seeing value do you think they'd say I'm just busy do you think they'd say uh I don't know someone quit on me and I I just don't have the time or attention to pay to

04:16    this or like what do you think I think customers feel shame in that oh it's another thing on my list I'm not doing right I supposed to get in touch with you too so I think people aren't authentic or truthful when you ask that type of question they try to like skate by it and things like that so that's where I feel like that brainstorm approach what I always try to empower my team of is empathy of your customers word is one very small piece of that customer's day that client's day they've

04:42    got a whole plate of things they're dealing with but that's the code we can't crack is like what that true reason is why customers will just ghost you I think part of it is just uncomfortable especially if they might be on the churn path they like you as a person and they don't want to hurt your feelings or the company's feeling so to speak maybe not Dillon but the rest of us yeah I this isn't quite a rock solid analogy but I always take customer success back to personal usually romantic relationships and when you're

05:10    breaking up with someone if you if they're breaking up with you and you say hey this is the perfect time for you to tell me why it's so unlikely that they're going to really lay it out for you they're going to say it's not you it's me right like that classic phrase and so I like where your head is at maryan that you almost have to assume the best in attention and just try a million different things you take a hypothesis and you execute on it of well maybe we are getting stuck in spam so

05:38    let me behave as though that is what's happening don't assume the worst and just keep trying that and I think in rare scenarios you will have an opportunity to ask them so was that the case is that what was happening but I think no matter the answer you get you kind of have to take it with a grain of salt yeah and I think you need to truly look within where opportunity might be so I'll give you an example of that in the tech world we see a lot of customers consolidating software they want to do One-Stop shopping so they're

06:05    consolidating down so you could have a customer that comes to you and says hey I'm churning because we decided to consolidate software and you know your company is is on The Chopping walk for that but I think it's important not to look at just the face value of the answer but the real root cause right the real problem there is that the customer doesn't see you as a valuable business partner to talk to you during the process of that evaluation you need TOs and those where they understand all you have toer and you're part of that

06:37    troubleshooting piece that they understand your return on investment and all those things that you can help carry them across through that Finance team conversation or that executive conversation to say hey this is a valuable tool and we help arm them with the information they need versus us being on the end of it where it's a churn conversation sure JP what do you think yeah I think collectively you get an email these days unless it's from your boss or something you know who who is this right people

07:08    emails are a diamond dozen people are treating these things like baloney sandwiches on Tuesdays you got to train people how do they know you have a Friday Porter House right that means that your email has got to be your email game needs to be stepped up now whether they open it or not is another thing but I think of a lot of things the customer suggest is like training like how to train your dragon How to Train your customer you know you keep feeding them these Kibbles and bits and then you wonder why they just like barf out shine

07:35    you really got to give them that highgrade organic child you know what I mean and that's what your emails got to be so like what do the emails look like like what's the data on that right like can we step our email game up so that eventually when they do start answering our emails then they're like wait a minute I need to I need to open up this email because JP I think has another food analogy for me and I at least need to get my food analog did you right did you just call Mary's customers dogs no

08:05    but can we say JP's got like the best analogies holy macro that was a layer cake of analogies there's so many of them can I add to that J go ahead only if you've got an analogy I don't Rob likes baloney sandwiches on Thursday sorry I actually do I actually do I grew up eating a lot of balone sandwiches but that's family can't with ketchup we did baloney and ketchup we did too Dyan are from the e Co I am psylvia I knew it well some practical advice analogies aside some things I've

08:37    done to mitigate this and some things that I've got in this non-responsive Playbook that I'm working on is first of all I think getting a customer's cell phone on the kickoff getting your economic buyer cell phone on the kickoff is a very good tip that might be the only chance you have to get it um multi-threading in the customer org is also really good so sometimes you move up the chain to the economic buyer sometimes you move down the chain to the gatekeeper and then also even multi-threading within your own org

09:03    right so maybe you like you ask your manager to reach out if you ask your CEO to reach out now a lot of CEOs you want this to be a last resort because you don't want your CEOs to think that you're going to come to them asking for everything a lot of people listening to this might not even have a direct connection to their CEOs but that is another Last Resort option the last the final Last Resort option that I use actually is an email to the customer just asking them have you given up so this sequence I'm working on is a 14-day

09:29    sequence and it ends the last is an email saying have you given up and that has worked for me because customers will often say no just not a good time I'm like okay at least we have some pulse from them but this is a really difficult topic so thank you for bringing it up Mary yeah know and I think you know in our quarterly business reviews and things like that as best practices from others a great question to ask kind of similar to the one you said is is there anything blocking you or getting you in the way from renewing next term and that

09:54    just opens the conversation and the door to have a straightforward conversation about absolutely Mary that's our time thank you so much fantastic topic you really brought the Heat and JP brought the meats to cook on top of it so really appreciate it Mary hope to have you back soon be careful of course nice to see you by you've been listening to the Daily standup by lifetime value please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and

10:25    do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers for all inquiries please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetime Value media.com find us on YouTube at lifetime value and find us on the socials at lifetime value media until next time hey folks it's Dillon here thank you for tuning in as always now I've got a favor to ask of you if you've made it this far hopefully it means you like what we're doing with our program so I'm asking you to please give this a like

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